There are three basic sets of pesky details. There are pesky fundamentals from the science of Ecology. There are pesky fundamentals from the science of Physics. There are pesky fundamentals from the science of Chemistry. We didn't invent them and if it were for us to choose, we would like very much to be able to ignore or to rationalize them away. But that would be intellectually dishonest. We too wish to be optimists. We too would like very much to believe in a faultless Eco-Car, or a faultless world for that matter. Don't be put off by our insistence upon intellectual honesty. We'll bring you up to speed regarding what the interesting new energy technology is while at the same time pointing out some of what it isn't. General big picture understanding is good enough. Because accurate heuristic understanding is better than fallacious misconception. Then of course, we'll have to tell you the rest of the pesky details.

Hydrogen derived from hydrolysis of water is the best source of hydrogen for several reasons. Hydrogen derived from hydrocarbons or alcohols is an alternative. Some examples are methane, methanol, propane, or octane.

Fuel Cell Chemistry:

Bond dissociation energies as close enough approximations.
H-H, 436 kJ/mol, H-C, 413 kJ/mol, H-O, 366 kJ/mol, O=O, 498 kJ/mol
science.uwaterloo.ca/~cchieh/cact/c120/bondel.html

Fuel cells are just fancy, albeit highly efficient, batteries. Fuel cells can store energy and from that stored energy they can generate electricity, but they do not create energy. They are not primary sources of energy. It's a law of Thermodynamics which we didn't make, so please don't blame us if energy can't be created or destroyed. These fancy batteries require energy which has to come from somewhere and which is expended as an end product which does not re-enter a closed loop.

Sure some of the systems work at hot temperatures and some of the designs use exotic minerals and materials. But let's focus on the net energy.


As can be seen, the net energy change of a perfect system is zero. In this ideal case all the energy from the original hydrogen bonds is able to perform work. How perfectly splendid. Can you beat that with a big stick? You put in two moles of water and you get two moles of water out.You put in 1,464 kilo Joules and you get 1,464 kilo Joules out the other side to do whatever work you need done. Way cool. You can power up a little radio, or a computer, or an air conditioner, or a ship, or a car, or a plane, or even a steel mill. Cool, huh?
Well, yes. But there are a couple of things. Do you put the 1,464 kilo Joules back to work making more energy? No. Okay. And how much energy has to be spent to provide the inputs to our perfect system?

Myth: Methane!
METHANE MADNESS: A NATURAL GAS PRIMER, by Randy Udall & Steve Andrews, 04/13/2001
Myth: Methanol!
Myth: Ethanol!
"Ethanol production is wasteful of fossil energy resources and does not increase energy security. This is because considerably more energy, much of it high-grade fossil fuels, is required to produce ethanol than is available in the ethanol output. Specifically, about 71% more energy is used to produce a gallon of ethanol than the energy contained in a gallon of ethanol."
http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/v98n2/mkh-new7.html

David Pimentel:
"Introduction: Ethanol does not provide energy security for the future. It is not a renewable energy source, is costly in terms of production and subsidies, and its production causes serious environmental degradation." According to one study, To fuel one car with ethanol for one year means that nearly 7-times more cropland would be required to fuel one car than is needed to feed one American (USDA, 1996).

Fossil hydrocarbons will be exhausted so these three alternative fuels must eventually be derived from biomass. Production of ethanol, methanol, and ethane fuels from biomass is energy intensive and actually represent energy sinks. They contain less energy than what it takes to produce them. In fact all the chemical building blocks for products now synthetically derived from fossil hydrocarbon sources will eventually be derived from biomass. These will also be energy intensive processes. Which means that even if solar and wind could provide the energy, enormous, and by enormous, we mean really huge areas of land will be required for production of the necessary biomass. How large an area will six billion humans need? At least as large as the entire area now used worldwide for agriculture and then some, would be a very conservative estimate. Pimentel estimates, "Assuming a net production of 50 gallons of fuel per acre of corn, and assuming that all cars in the United States were fueled with ethanol, a total of approximately 2 billion acres of cropland would be required to provide the corn feedstock. This amount of acreage is more than 5-times all the cropland that is actually and potentially available for all crops in the future in the United States." And that's just to meet the energy requirement for cars. What about food?

Agricultural land can not satisfy energy needs for food, fuels, and the chemical building blocks for production of synthetic chemical products. Agricultural land barely satisfies the food requirements of 6 billion people as it is. That means that fission, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric and wind power in some combination will have to meet future hydrogen-based energy needs. Geothermal is obviously limited, although expandable. Humans have put dams on just about anything flowing downhill, flooding out both humans and life forms. Although there is some room for hydroelectic expansion it can't be done above dams already in place on major arteries such as the Colorado and the Yangtze since water is used from the lakes behind those dams to such an extent that the rivers are dry before reaching the sea. A rethink of the exaggerated hysteria surrounding fission is possible and would give many decades of relief from the coming oil crisis. But a rethink is not probable given that fissionable material needs to be controlled more for reasons of international security than anything else. David and Marcia Pimentel are optimistic about the remaining alternatives estimating that the US could be completely self reliant and sustainable, albeit with a population reduction of about 50%. Howard and Elizabeth Odum are not so optimistic in renewable energy accounting. They would like to determine whether the problem is being solved or whether we are just biding time until the next big crisis. Necessarily they take a good close look at what energy actually costs, including all the nitpicky details and well, including everything. What boors. What party-poopers. Calculations show that solar cells cost twice as much solar eMjoules as they produce. And in order to be renewable, of course, an energy system must produce at least enough energy to reproduse itself.

In any case, those are some of the cost-benefit considerations for human environmentalism. Ecology without genuine regard for other life forms is environmentalsim. The term environmentalsim is a clever semantic device society uses to preclude all but superficial consideration of habitat destruction and species extermination from ecological considerations. The aim is to promote warm fuzziness and to lessen guilt as we narrow our thoughts to the anthropocentric sphere of concern. In other words, what is ecology after you've subtracted consideration of other life forms? Economics.

Key Point
The overall effIciency of the systems.
A physicist or an engineer is trained to think in these terms and so would recognize the significance immediately. Engineers typically have a sort of techno-utopian leaning. Which is a good thing really. If they didn't they would have less of an inclination to push the limits, as it were. However, getting a physicist or an engineer who is a techno-utopian to look at a presentation of this sort when the association with ecology or population is present on the same page is next to impossible. But aside from that, the simple arithmetic calculation goes this way. It is simple arithmetic. Here are some sample arithmetic calculations you may wish to calculate on your slide rule. Or electronic calculator, if you prefer. It is interesting to note how multiplication of fractions always results in numbers which are smaller than any of the multiplicands.
(0.3) x (0.6) x (0.8) = ?
(0.3) x (0.8) x (0.9) = ?
(0.4) x (0.8) x (0.8) = ?
(0.4) x (0.6) x (0.9) = ?
(0.3) x (0.4) x (0.8) = ?
(0.5) x (0.5) x (0.9) = ?
All the energy that is present with which to perform work is available in Physical System One. Each "X" represents a change from one Physical System to the next. That's where energy is lost. If 20% energy is lost in going from one system to the next one, you have an 80% efficiency. Typically, that is a very good efficiency. Proponents of fuel cells tout an almost 90% efficiency for going from Physical System Three to Physical System Four. Relatively speaking, that is very very good efficiency. Let's be fair and not dispute that.
The problem is that the conversions before the final one are not being counted when you hear about fuel cells being a panacea. In fact the last conversion of energy for the internal combustion engine is itself very good, above about 80%. Fuel cells then, can give a boost in efficiency of that last conversion between Physical Systems on the order of about ten percent. That's the bottom line. That bottom line is what the vast majority of those who have ever heard of the big bad Fuel Cell either ignore, or don't know.

Efficiency of converting energy from one physical system to another physical system.
Proponents proudly explain that the efficiency of fuel cells, the cornerstone of a new hydrogen based world is high. And granted it is high, upwards of 80-90%. And everything looks just dandy. As long as you don't count the source of the hydrogen. Ostensibly this is not included because it isn't inside the electricity generating unit. In reality, however this energy factor isn't counted so that fuel cells will look better than what they really are; they are in fact fancy batteries. And these fancy batteries require energy which has to come from somewhere and which is expended as an end product which does not re-enter a closed loop There is interesting technology here but it does not countermand fundamental laws of either physics or thermodynamics. We remain in the same real world. A world with Laws of Ecology which have heretofore been observed to hold rigorously.

"Efficiency of Fuel Cells
Fuel-Cell-Powered Electric Car
If the fuel cell is powered with pure hydrogen, it has the potential to be up to 80-percent efficient. That is, it converts 80 percent of the energy content of the hydrogen into electrical energy. But, as we learned in the previous section, hydrogen is difficult to store in a car. When we add a reformer to convert methanol to hydrogen, the overall efficiency drops to about 30 to 40 percent. We still need to convert the electrical energy into mechanical work. This is accomplished by the electric motor and inverter. A reasonable number for the efficiency of the motor/inverter is about 80 percent. So we have 30- to 40-percent efficiency at converting methanol to electricity, and 80-percent efficiency converting electricity to mechanical power. That gives an overall efficiency of about 24 to 32 percent.
Gasoline-Powered Car
The efficiency of a gasoline-powered car is surprisingly low. All of the heat that comes out as exhaust or goes into the radiator is wasted energy. The engine also uses a lot of energy turning the various pumps, fans and generators that keep it going. So the overall efficiency of an automotive gas engine is about 20 percent. That is, only about 20 percent of the thermal-energy content of the gasoline is converted into mechanical work.
Battery-Powered Electric Car
The battery is about 90-percent efficient, and the electric motor/inverter is about 80-percent efficient. This gives an overall efficiency of about 72 percent. But that is not the whole story. The electricity used to power the car had to be generated somewhere. If it was generated at a power plant that used a combustion process (rather than nuclear, hydroelectric, solar or wind), then only about 40 percent of the fuel required by the power plant was converted into electricity. The process of charging the car requires the conversion of alternating current (AC) power to direct current (DC) power. This process has an efficiency of about 90 percent. So, if we look at the whole cycle, the efficiency of an electric car is 72 percent for the car, 40 percent for the power plant and 90 percent for charging the car. That gives an overall efficiency of 26 percent. The overall efficiency varies considerably depending on what sort of power plant is used. If the electricity for the car is generated by a hydroelectric plant for instance, then it is basically free (we didn't burn any fuel to generate it), and the efficiency of the electric car is about 65 percent. Surprised? Maybe you are surprised by how close these three technologies are. This exercise points out the importance of considering the whole system, not just the car. We could even go a step further and ask what the efficiency of producing gasoline, methanol or coal is..." -- How Fuel Cells Work, a multi part presentation by Karim Nice.
howstuffworks.com/fuel-cell4.htm

"Our Energy System is composed of: energy sources, currencies, technologies and services. Energy sources are things like coal, crude oil, natural gas, hydraulic power, uranium, sunlight, and wind. Energy currencies are similar to monetary currency. Just as money allows financial transactions to take place, energy currencies allow energy transactions to take place. Two energy currencies hold the greatest promise for a renewable energy future: electricity and hydrogen. Electricity is clean and fast, but cannot be effectively stored. Hydrogen can be readily stored and transported. Hydrogen can make electricity, and electricity can make hydrogen. Together, they create an energy loop that is completely renewable and harmless to the environment"
HydrogenUS.com/nha_bro2.htm

Hydrogen is the fuel of the future and the future isn't far off. But, come on guys, this is stretching it. The folks who wrote this were at best too enthusiastic. The analogy of money and energy misses the mark somewhat. If you wanted four quarters to put into a vending machine you may ask a convenience store clerk for four quarters in exchange for a dollar bill. That would be a good system. The inputs equal theoutputs. Whereas in the physical world, you would give the equivalent of a dollar bill and be satisfied to recieve two quarters. Hydrogen makes electricity and electricity turns around and makes hydrogen? That would be spectacular, wouldn't it? An energy loop that is completely renewable and evironmentally harmless? Great, where do we sign up for that? Wake up and smell the coffee. Hydrogen as a secondary energy source requires a input of from a primary energy source. This primary energy has to come from somewhere and is expended as an end product which does not re-enter a closed loop.

Misrepresentations of overall efficiency of fuel cells is intellectual dishonesty. Misrepresentation of hydrogen as a primary energy source is equally misleading. We might add parenthetically that we are very favorably impressed by Ballard Power Systems for in no way misrepresenting its hydrogen energy based products. In fact they clearly state the difference between primary and secondary energy sources in their product descriptions.

Super capacitors are another promising technological development which will enhance electrical designs in the future.
"Supercapacitors vs Batteries:
Everybody knows that batteries are brilliant at storing electricity but they are not so good at transferring it. They are destroyed if charged too quickly. It is equally damaging, and often impossible, to drain them fast. This is obviously a problem for automobile manufacturers who want good acceleration with a quick recharge time. Capacitors store their power in the form of static electricity as opposed to chemical energy, the method employed by batteries. In the past they have only been able to give small capacities; enough to pop a flashbulb but moving a car was out of the question. However, things are about to change following research into supercapacitors which can store up to 5,400 times as much electricity as conventional capacitors. Since there is no chemical reaction involved with their operation a supercapacitor can be charged and discharged thousands of times with no detrimental effect. This is one advantage they have over batteries. Another is that they can charge and discharge faster and last longer that batteries."
geocities.com/battcar2001/evs14.htm#SUPER
-- Jack Moore

References for this page and links.

Habitat. Biodiversity. Species extinctions. SANI values.
This is the part people really, really don't want to think about. They'll do and say just about anything to avoid thinking about ecology. It's not really the math. Heck, the math is simple. Nope. they want to put complete faith in technology to wash away their guilt. They just want to skip away scot free without making any changes to the old status quo. Thinking about ecology just brings them back to a cold sober reality. It kind of throws a big wet blanket over everything.
Habitat will continue to decrease. Biodiversity will continue to decrease rapidly. SANI values will continue to decrease rapidly. Species extinctions will continue to increase rapidly. Until humans decide to reduce human population or until so much biodiversity has been lost so as to make the question of biodiversity virtually academic. How much time? There is on the order of two to four decades until the question of biodiversity will have been made essentially moot.

Eco-cars Schmeco-cars. The development of eco-cars is largely irrelevant as long as the human population does not decrease. A decade longer or a decade sooner won't really matter when the final species equilibrium is reached.

Who me? Yes, you. Of course the national aeronautics and space administration is doing its part to hide the evidence and prevent it from being seen. In fact the national aeronautics and space administration is preparing to be privatized. This will have the effect of permanently removing the most effective and powerful tool for direct viewing of ecological damage to habitat. Imagery will no longer be in the public domain and freely accessible by both researchers or John and Jane Q. Public. An accident? These guys think of everything. It fits a relentlessly repeating patter, doesn't it?

If only the available imagery could be presented properly, we would be able to see the habitat destruction on a day by day basis anywhere and everywhere. At any given square meter of the globe. Like this:

Can you say, "Political football?" Sure, you can.

For as long as humans sing that old lame tune about how there's no HOP and technology is the glorious answer to everything, remaining ecosystem areas will continue to be transformed into agricultural areas.

Myth: Technology is omniscient and will solve everything.
Habitat is the core fundamental of the science of ecology. Technology will never and by its very nature can never solve human destruction of biodiversity. Because technology itself, from its crudest forms to its most elegantly sophisticated forms, causes:

Rube Goldberg, a cartoonist/engineer satirizes technology at:
rubegoldberg.com/
"Through his 'inventions', Rube Goldberg discovered harder ways to achieve easy results." That's something we'll have to become good at as we force ourselves to continue living in denial of HOP. "His cartoons were as he said, symbols of man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results. Rube believed that there are two ways to do things, the simple and the hard way, and that a surprisingly number of people preferred doing things the hard way."
rubegoldberg.com/html/bio.htmFor biodiversity, technology is ultimately, the impossible way because technology can not recreate destroyed habitat. We are sorry to have to bust your bubble if you are a denialist and have put your faith blindly in technology. The fantasy that technology is omnicient is the most important tool in the arsenal of those who see the earth's biodiversity as expendable. This fantasy in tandem with ignorance of the importance of habitat promotes complacency.

Mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru.

Why does President Bush insist that we burn up what's left of our fossil fuel entropic dowry as fast as possible? His insistence that it must be done -- whatever the reason, infuriates any scientist. Non-scientists can be excused for not knowing enough to become angry, they don't know what's going on anyway. Here's the question we were asked , an answer for which requires one to put on a contrarian thinking cap. If renewable energy in general and fuel cells/hydrogen in particular is so great, why isn't the US making the appropriate commitment this late in the game? That is to say, why is President Bush committed so strongly to use up fossil fuels instead of moving ahead? This is a level four question so it can not be answered with a knee jerk response. The knee jerk answer would be that he is stupid, an image which he cultivates carefully. But that's not it. It is said that he has ties with the fossil fuel industry. Wrong again. There is something much more important. But we'll leave it for you to ponder. Reading levels three and four of ecology understanding will give a hint.